Okay, that’s not a truly fair title. Being an asshole is no more a function of being old or young, of any social or economic class, or of any gender you care to list. We all have regrettable moments.
But in the case of Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg, a recent editorial (and its various rebuttals) in the Science Fiction Writers’ Association (SFWA) has led to some really epic genderfail discussions in the SSF culture. The condensed version is this: the 200th volume of the SFWA’s quarterly Bulletin had a cover of a ‘warrior woman’ dressed in a rather skimpy outfit. The publication also contained the above-mentioned editorial by Resnick and Malzberg, ostensibly about the professional contributions of ‘ladies’ (i.e. female editors, writers, and fans) to the largely male-dominated SFF community in the 1950s and 1960s.
I think they meant well, and tried for an avuncular tone about how ‘it wasn’t really so bad in the old days’. It came across as sad, defensive, and an unintentional revelation of how bad the field was for female professionals.
Gini Koch at Slice of Sci Fi has a good breakdown of the original post here.
Jim Hines, unthreatened Power Male that he is, has links to many other rebuttals here.
Even Resnick’s daughter Laura weighed in, with her reasoned response.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to add to the discussion, but I looked at the contents of my paperback shelves today. There are a hell of a lot of books there by brilliant women who published during the period referenced. Or just after it, in the heady 1970s when gender barriers were being shattered even faster. Books by men who were obviously not flummoxed by the women flooding into their genre, or the perceived softening of hard SFF toward romantic and psychological sub-plots.
As an eleven-year-old girl, I read SFF voraciously. Hard and soft, space opera or science-based exploration, even New-Wave insanity that was probably way too old for me (but since I’d learned to leverage benevolent parental neglect, I sure wasn’t going to give up on books that made me say ‘Ewww’ as often as they did ‘Wow’.)
I didn’t plan on ever trying to write and publish this stuff myself. That happened much later. In my teens, I was just a reader. Just a fan. But like a soundtrack of Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Rush, the books I read had a deep influence on my personality. No wonder some people are afraid of letting their kids read! I found personal validation in the works of Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Jo Clayton, Tanith Lee, and many other female authors. Not only because they told great stories, but because they were women, in a field that I recognized even then had been shaped largely by male viewpoints.
We’ve come a long way. Probably not far enough, or with enough sensitivity and care for all sides. I despise one of the modern tropes, seen so often in TV commercials and sitcoms, of ‘stupid males being led around by women’. I don’t like it when my ultrafeminist sisters see the worst in a male engineer’s most innocent Asperger Syndrome reaction. I think that’s as insulting as when one male Republican lawmaker talks about ‘legitimate rape’, or another says science is ‘lies from the pit of hell’.
And I really, really hate to see my beloved SFF, emotional and intellectual refuge from many of my heartbroken teenage angstfests, being torn apart from within by so many different camps. I’ve blogged about this before: hard SFF folks hate soft SFF folks, epic fantasy buffs look down on urban fantasy, the great mainstream SFF houses for many years looked down on ‘too much romance’ in their books, let alone any of that perverted ‘gay stuff’.
But if I have to take a stand on anyone’s side, I’ll stand with the outraged bloggers I’ve linked to above. Bring on the Girl Cooties.
I don’t have a link to it yet, but I’ve heard some fairly compelling hypotheses that females either came up with or expanded our ancestors’ language capabilities. Whether that was for efficiency in food gathering, information passage to the next generations, or just good old gossip, who knows? Women have been storytellers, probably as far back as our tentative relationship with fire. For a really long time, the demands of family life prevented many women from being scholars or politicians, and setting down their perspectives of their world. The ones who did were often reviled as mutants, or had their work stolen outright by male associates.
We’re better than baboon behavior now. Better than our biology, better than the mere instinctive responses to our evolution. Recognizing that could be the real legacy of the soft science fiction revolution.
I am a long way from deciding if I want to belong to SFWA or not. I’ll wait for my publishing credits to catch up to eligibility requirements, and see if this is a group I should join to help protect from within, or avoid at all costs. But I’m glad the discussion hit a boiling point, because we can all learn from it.
Do you know where I can find the text (or at least a good critical commentary of the whole text and not just the ‘ladies’ part) of Resnick and Malzberg’s original comments on the history. I’ve seen their reply to the critics, but I have yet to see the original writing that has caused so much of a storm. I have no access to SFWA archives, so I can’t read the “Warrior Woman” cover issue. But surely someone must have done more than merely complain that they called a ‘lady’ pretty or beautiful.
I found the original article by following links from Gini’s post, to Scibd.com. It was a disheartening thing to read. Look for the first link (200th cover article) then scroll down to the Resnick & Malzberg column.